Even those businesses which are not currently involved in Carousel will need to take note of Google Local’s latest change, which places Google+ Local Business images on the Local Search Engine Results Page.

As with Google Authorship, these results make your business far more clickable. Observe how the photo makes the result “pop” right off the page. This is the same example and screen shot that Linda used in her post.

There are a couple of speculations about how and why this is happening.

At least one of my tests showed me what appeared to be a clear case of a Google Authorship photo appearing on the local search results. Yet the photos Linda found appeared to have populated from the businesses’ Google+ Business page. It could also be that these companies are using Google Publisher, which is similar to Google Authorship and which I’ll take the time to cover next week.

But the takeaway here is that you need to have Google Authorship set up, you need to have good photos on your business profile, and you need to maximize any and all chances for these photographs to pop up wherever people might see them. It’s clear to me that Google is trying very hard to create a web that is far less anonymous and far more visual, and as a business owner you need to be on top of that trend.